Rituals
by LikeableTarsier
Summary: SSHP. Harry is dying and Severus can't cope. Warning: Light angst, old people.


Rituals 

I slip into the sterile white room, closing the plastic-wood door softly behind me. Harry is propped up in a bed only a few feet from where I stand, but I can see in his relaxed posture that he is miles away. His eyes are covered by thick (no baldness in his family) moon-silver hair, which I know curls when he lets it grow, so that whatever memory he is living in goes unread by any who observe him. It's a habit he picked up during the war; we have many habits between us and they are hard to break.

I sit on the very edge of an uncomfortable vinyl chair, decorated in a terrible combination of puce and mauve. The chemical reek in this room is so terrible that I can't even begin to describe it's individual components; I only know that even the foulest of my experimental potions would be more pleasing if only because it is natural. My nose twitches and I fight back the urge to snort.

I prefer to wait for Harry to notice my presence rather than rousing him. It gives me an opportunity to admire him while he indulges in his own addictions, of which this particular one is my favorite. It allows me to remember his eyes as they were for sixty of the eighty-five years we've spent torturing and nurturing each other, without memory being overpowered by their present milk-foggy state.

Harry had beautiful eyes. They were sharp, observant, the only reason I'd caught him out after curfew as a student as few times as I had. I've been able to sneak up on him more and more frequently as time marches on, until now when he barely catches me one time out of a hundred.

Quiet beeps struggle to mask the sound created as his ribcage contracts and air whistles from his nose. It does not yet should like a wheeze, thank Merlin, Albus, and whatever gods there may be, but I know that wheezing will come with time's inevitable passing. There is so little time left to us, and I know it is not nearly enough. Only eternity could be enough.

Harry is not the man I fell in love with eighty-seven years ago, and again fifty-two years ago,forty, thirty, twenty, some years ago, and again last week, and yesterday. There is always something else for me to discover so I can fall in love with him all over again. It's become as much of a habit as being abrupt with my students or waking up next to a warm body in the morning. The idea of not having Harry is incomprehensible to me, but very soon he will be gone, no matter how I rage and cry that he is too young to leave me. Time has proven itself a much more formidable enemy than Tom Riddle ever hoped to be.

"Hello there," Harry says, raising his chin and brushing his fringe out of his eyes with gnarled fingers. He acknowledges me with a slow smile that makes minute origami constructs from the papery skin at the corners of his eyes. His smile is as breathtaking as it ever was, so I simply nod to him.

"Have you been there long?" he says, using his not-quite-focused gaze to define my chair as a foreign territory far separated from the bed. I nod again, and he smiles wider, which sends his temples and cheeks into deep-lined chaos. Harry knows my habit of watching him as well as I know his of eating nutella and jam sandwiches when he misses Ronald Weasley.

"Join me?" he asks, patting the bed.

I lower myself to the new terrain gently, careful not to jostle his pain-stiffened body or my own. My fingers trace the maze of his wrinkled face. I can see his blood pulsing sluggishly in the blue veins that stand out starkly in his gray face. The little life-tunnels lead my hands to his neck then to his sharp bony shoulder which is dulled only slightly by the thin, oddly pattered garment he wears, and finally to his own hands where we clasp, mindful of arthritic joints.

"How are you feeling today?" I ask, aware that I mind hearing more than he minds telling but listening anyway, hoping for an indication of how much time remains to us. It has never seemed fair to me that two who share everything in their lives as we do should not share their time on earth as well, averaging what remains to them that they might depart in the same instant. Harry has never begrudged me my longevity, but I doubt it has occurred to him I am envious that he will be going first. I knew from the very beginning of our relationship that he would be the one to leave me, one way or another, and not I him.

"Better," he lies. I prefer it when he says he feels the same because it's honest. Whenever he's worse he tells me otherwise. Briefly I wonder if his glazed expression is due to muggle painkillers but then I remember that he swore to take only the potions I make for him.

Neither of us says anything for a long time. I trace my finger over his scar, which is now just another thin silver line on his heavily lined skin, then return my hand to his. He twists my wedding band around on my ring finger, whose knuckles are so twisted and swollen that it would have to be charmed off. We sit together in a grotesque mimicry of peace, trying not to think about the future.

"I can't stay long," I say, hoping Harry will pretend to take my words at face value. I'm not lying, exactly; I do have a class to teach in a few minutes. Harry of course understands that I can't accept him like this, that I can't acknowledge that we've grown too old, not just yet.

"Just a little longer," he says, and I smile bitterly into his shoulder. I have all the time in the world, it is Harry who has a limit, yet I feel every passing second much more keenly than he. But I'm not so selfish that I can't give him five minutes he already has. I hold him and he holds me; we rock each other gently in a parody of mother's arms.

"I love you," I whisper into the standard geometric-pattern of his cotton shoulder.

"I love you too," Harry reassures me, pushing me away to check the time, "and you have to leave"

I hug him one last time before creaking to my knees. They groan in protest as I move to the door. It is opened by the same hand that touched Harry's scar. I step outside the dead room to catch my breath.

"You know I have to go soon too," he calls after me, imitating my earlier words. I've never been able to win an argument with him. I have, however, no objections to putting off this argument for as long as possible.

"Just a little longer," I pray to the doorframe, suddenly ashamed to make the request directly to his hunched form.

'Wait for me,' I think.

"I'll try, Severus," he says, as he has said every day for the past three years. And I wait for him to smile before I close the door, as I have every day for the past three years. Harry and I are both terrible at breaking habits.

Today I have to leave the door open, and I'm late for my class with the Gryffindor 7th years.


End file.
